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True Believers

A new book explores familiar and unfamiliar tales of the unusual from Utah.

Sometimes, you’re in the mood for a
full sit-down dinner centered on a
main course; other times, you just
want to sample a variety of items from
a buffet. Michael O’Reilly’s Mysteries and
Legends of Utah: True Stories of the Unsolved
and Unexplained offers the literary version
of the latter option, branching off
into a dozen different subjects. Several
of O’Reilly’s topics and characters—the
Mountain Meadows massacre, Jedediah
Smith, Butch Cassidy, the Willie and Martin
handcart companies—have been the subjects
of numerous books of very specific
focus. Mysteries and Legends offers a nice
starter course on these subjects for those
who are curious about these local tales.

Some of the stories reveal much about the
thinking patterns we Utahns often engage
in. Two of the chapters center on legends of
mines that, in one way or another, were said
to house gold and other valuable materials
stored away long ago by the Nephites
and Lamanites who populate the Book of
Mormon, while a third centers on silver bars
left behind by Spanish explorers. For people
who believe that Joseph Smith found a book
of gold plates in a hill in New York, finding
buried treasure in the promised land of Zion
isn’t much of a stretch and often something
people are willing to invest money and time
in finding.

The one downside to this scattershot
approach is that making a long story short
sometimes forces O’Reilly into simply
jumping from one fact to the next to get
everything in, detracting from the ability
to tell an overall story or offer insight. Then
again, if O’Reilly piques readers’ interest
enough that they want to go read more
extensive information about any one of
these stories, he’s done his job.

O’Reilly is a much better reporter than
storyteller, and the best chapters in the book
come when he interviews “experts” who are
studying ghosts at This Is The Place Heritage
Park, UFO sightings in Utah’s night skies and
the migratory habits of Bigfoot. Insights into
the faith of any human in something that
can’t be scientifically verified are illustrated
in the account of a dispute between Darrell
Smith and Jeff Meldrum, who have both
devoted decades of their lives to Sasquatch
research but can’t agree on how many toes
the big beasts have. Smith thinks Bigfoot
could somehow be reptilian, perhaps even
tied into UFOs, but, “[Smith] isn’t in any
hurry to cause rifts in the tight-knit community
of Bigfoot researchers,” O’Reilly
writes. “… Really, one can’t blame him for
not wanting to sound crazy.” Afraid of coming
off as irrational at a Bigfoot convention?
Such is the irrational, but also fulfilling,
nature of belief.

Smith’s views are relatively tame compared
to those O’Reilly comes across at
MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) meetings
held in a public library in Utah: Shape-shifting
reptilians that appear to be human,
living among us while getting elected to
public office and running the Freemasons.
A mystery planet that will destroy Earth in
2012. The government engaging in population
control by putting chemicals in the
seemingly innocent-looking vapor trails
from airplanes. O’Reilly, who claims to
have seen a UFO himself, catalogs all of
these without sounding judgmental or condescending.
One has to admire his attempts
to get to the bottom of things and obtain
some sense of how real Bigfoot, UFO sightings
or the ghost of one of Brigham Young’s
wives might be.

Contrast that view with the one put
forth by Linda Dunning in her 2007 book,
Lost Landscapes: Utah’s Ghosts, Mysterious
Creatures, and Aliens, which makes an
excellent companion read with O’Reilly’s
work. Dunning takes a good-natured,
ghost-stories-a round-the-campfire
approach that is more concerned with
how belief in the non-concrete enriches
our lives rather than worrying about how
accurate those convictions might be. With
either book, the reader can’t help thinking
about the makeup of his or her own belief
system, while also giving thought to just
exactly what really is out there.